First he made Star Trek. Then he was asked to make a new Star Wars. And after that? Well, it looks like J.J. Abrams wants to bring Half-Life and Portal to the big screen.
Star Wars: Episode 7 director J.J. Abrams and Valve CEO Gabe Newell are "in the early stages" of working together to produce film adaptations of the Half-Life and Portal franchises during their keynote at DICE 2013 in Las Vegas today.
According to Kotaku, who live-blogged the event, Abrams told Newell: "There's an idea we have for a game that we'd like to work with Valve on." To which Newell resonded: "We're going to find out if there's a way we can work with you on a Portal and Half-Life movie."
Newell has said he's been approached by filmmakers in the past about making movies out of Valve games, but never felt right about the idea. In 2010, he told PC Gamer that Valve had considered making Hollywood versions of their games on their own.
After the event, J.J. Abrams told Polygon that, not only were the pair "interested" in working together, they had actually sat down and set things in motion. "It's as real as anything in Hollywood ever gets," said Abrams. "Which is that we are really talking to Valve, we are going to be bringing on a writer, we have a lot of very interesting ideas."
It's worth noting that plenty of films have gotten much further than this, only to fall apart and never see the light of day. In the last few years films based on massive franchises like Halo, Uncharted, and Bioshock have all crashed and burned. Still it's exciting to see two producers with a history both critical and financial success are coming together: Maybe they'll even have a shot at making a good movie.